Estimating Residents’ Preferences of the Land Use Program Surrounding Forest Park, Taiwan

Abstract

This paper aims to build up a preference function to evaluate the public benefits of the type of agricultural farming, biodiversity, water provisions, land use type, ecotourism modes, and a monetary attribute (willingness to pay and willingness to work) associated with an ecosystem service and land use program in a forest park. This study used choice experiments to build a random utility model, analyze the average preference for the above land use attributes based on the conditional logit (CL) and used a latent class model to test the residents' heterogeneous preferences for land use planning in the forest park. We also estimated the welfare derived from various land use programs. The empirical result has shown that: (1) increasing organic farming area, increasing the surface water provision, increasing the area of custom flora, increasing the wetland area, and setting up an integrated framework for ecotourism increase the public's preference for the land use program; (2) farmer and non-farmers do not have the same land use preferences, attributes, marginal willingness to pay and willingness to work; and (3) the ecotourism development program incorporating biodiversity, organic farming, ethnobotany, and wetland area with integrated ecotourism has the highest values when compared to other land use program scenarios.

Capturing Tourists’ Preferences for the Management of Community-Based Ecotourism in a Forest Park

“…Meanwhile, the Forestry Bureau began to promote the 'Plains Landscape Reforestation and Beautification Program' to release farmland for new purposes, creating opportunities for local communities to develop eco-tourism and outdoor recreation locations [13]. This not only shows respect for the environment but has helped to create local employment.…”

“…The yea-saying bias in a traditional CVM design means that the respondents have a tendency to choose the option indicating 'yes' to express their opinions in place of their true preferences [15]. Therefore, for the evaluation of non-market goods, authors have indicated over the past two decades that CE has efficiencies and advantages surpassing the CVM [1,6,[13][14][15][16]. Furthermore, the CE model can capture respondents' preferences for potential quality improvement programs [13,[17][18][19], disclose multiple attributes and levels from empirical results that can be incorporated into policy making, and generate useful information for budget allocations based on specific topics [13,[16][17][18].…”

“…In the economic valuation field, and for issues surrounding individuals' multiple attributes and preferences in the nonmarket field [13,14], choice experiments (CE) can provide the respondents with a menu of alternative options for the evaluation of non-market goods [14]. Moreover, this method also analyzes substitutions and tradeoffs between goods and services [1].…”

“…Moreover, relatively little attention has been given specifically to tour packages linked to community-based programs or policies in forest parks or national parks, with a resulting dearth of information with policy implications for community-based ecotourism for local villages in forest parks [13,[24][25][26]. The few studies that have focused on the Danongdafu Forest Park (DFP) include a case study analysis of the institutional economics of the social-ecological system [24], a numerical analysis of the forest park's plantation evaluation [25], and a comparison of farmers' and non-farmers' preferences for land use planning [13].…”

“…Therefore, for the evaluation of non-market goods, authors have indicated over the past two decades that CE has efficiencies and advantages surpassing the CVM [1,6,[13][14][15][16]. Furthermore, the CE model can capture respondents' preferences for potential quality improvement programs [13,[17][18][19], disclose multiple attributes and levels from empirical results that can be incorporated into policy making, and generate useful information for budget allocations based on specific topics [13,[16][17][18]. The MWTP is capable of capturing tourists' preferences regarding recreational and cultural aspects of experience activities or in ecotourism valuation fields [1,3,6,14,15,[17][18][19].…”